73 Quotes by Darryl Pinckney

Harlem's streets lead backward, into history, straight to a work such as 'This Was Harlem.'

Harlem exists in retrospect, in the memory of grandparents or elderly cousins, those 'old-timers' ever ready with their geysers of remembered scenes. The legends of 'Black Mecca' are preserved in the glossy musicals of Times Square and in texts of virtually every kind.

I carried props into the subway - the latest 'Semlotext(e),' a hefty volume of the Frankfurt School - so that the employed would not get the wrong idea or, more to the point, the usual idea about me.

Novels set in distant places give us expectations not unlike those we have of travel writing, and often the distinctions are blurred, as in, say, the way the low life of Tokyo's Shinjuku Ward is depicted in John David Morley's recent 'Pictures from the Water Trade.'

Steven Spielberg's 'The Color Purple' might as well have been about a bunch of dancing eggplants for all it has to say about black history.

The novel and the film of 'The Color Purple' are both works of the imagination that make claim to historical truth.

'Go Tell It on the Mountain,' its pages heavy with sinners brought low and prayers groaning on the wind, scared me when I read it as a teenager.

The name James Baldwin had been around the house for as long as I could remember and meant almost as much as that of Martin Luther King.

Baldwin gave expression to the longings of blacks in exalted prose. He was embraced, in the tradition of Negro Firsterism, even by those who never sat down with a book, as our preeminent literary spokesman, whether he liked it or not. Neither athlete nor entertainer, but nevertheless a star.